Sunday, May 29, 2011

This is a noncommercial request under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts.

I request a complete and thorough search of all filing systems and locations for all records maintained by your agency pertaining to and/or captioned:

Ivan J. Greenberg

This is a request for records on myself.

By way of background, I am a former college history professor and the author of a recent book on the FBI, The Dangers of Dissent: The FBI and Civil Liberties since 1965 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield/Lexington Books 2010). During the past decade, I filed numerous FOIA requests with your office for my research. I initiated the FOIA lawsuit, Greenberg V. FBI, in 2008.

I have provided below a list of prior and current addresses where I have resided since 1992. Please check the local FBI field offices in these areas for records on me. I enclosed a recent resume to help you locate any records. I also enclosed the U.S. Justice Department Certification of Identity form.

--217 West 106 St. #5E New York, NY 10025

-- 1555 Oak St. #6 San Francisco, CA 94117

--1472 La Playa St. San Francisco, CA 94122

--2105 Wallace Ave. #5A Bronx, NY 10462

--102 W. Main St. (Hoover House) West Branch, IA 52358

--4005 Postgate Terrace #204 Silver Spring, MD 20906

This request specifically includes where appropriate "main" files and "see references," including but not limited to numbered and lettered sub files and control files. I also request a search of the Electronic Surveillance (ELSUR) Index, or any similar technique for locating records of electronic surveillance. I request that all records be produced with the administrative pages. I wish to be sent copies of "see reference" cards, abstracts, search slips, including search slips used to process this request, file covers, multiple copies of the same documents if they appear in a file, tapes of any electronic surveillance, photographs, and logs of physical surveillance (FISUR). Please place missing documents on "special locate."

Monday, May 16, 2011

J. Edgar Hoover’s conception of free speech did not include criticism of the FBI. Public expressions that challenged the supremacy of political policing should be monitored and, if possible, sabotaged. The “free press” was not free enough to question the validity of the government’s domestic intelligence system. A chief example of intolerance of press criticism is the FBI’s relationship to the Nation magazine. The magazine’s FBI file totals about 2,000 pages with the largest portion covering the late 1950s when the FBI believed it faced growing opposition to its spying practices. The Nation directly challenged FBI power when it devoted the Oct. 18, 1958, issue to a single article on the FBI by Fred J. Cook. The FBI viewed the article as “vicious” and “destructive” and began to track Cook interviewing his friends and family and opening his mail. Hoover wrote in a memo, “I think we should discreetly get a line on this man and his background and associations for current article just didn’t ‘bloom’ – it is planned literary garbage barrage against FBI by a dedicated [Alger] Hiss apologist.” The FBI also identified Nation editor Carey McWilliams as someone “long publicly identified with the activities of a number of subversive organizations.”

The Bureau investigated Nation contributors and leaked negative information about the magazine to members of Congress and friendly press sources to undermine its reputation. In 1959, the bureau produced a 180-page monograph, “Smear Campaign Against the FBI,” which focused exclusively on the magazine. The FBI feared the view that it should be restricted to investigations of criminal conduct and FBI critics run “the risk of being considered an enemy of the nation.” The FBI argued, “Cook’s article represents a manifesto for intensified attacks against the Bureau which can be expected in the future.” Only Communists (and their allies) wanted to limit FBI power. “The strategy of the smear campaign is now transparently revealed. With the FBI discredited and disposed of, communists and other subversive operatives would be able to flourish with relative impunity.”

Another FBI critic, historian Henry Steele Commager, often wrote for the popular press with negative views of the Red Scare. His FBI file (457 pages) covers more than 20 years. In 1947, the FBI opened an investigation after Commager’s article to Harper’s magazine (“Who is Loyal in the U.S.?”) attacked emerging McCarthyism. Commager’s defense of liberalism and criticism of the Director led top officials, such as assistant director William C. Sullivan, to view him as “a too vocal, bombastic and misinformed liberal or ‘fellow traveler.’” The FBI questioned his loyalty after an article for the Nation was distributed by the Communist Party to attract members. When Commager argued in the New York Times that the CP had a constitutional right to exist, the FBI noted that he “was making Communistic addresses and remarks which appeared to be harmful and not to the best interests of the Government of the United States.” In another article, Commager denounced loyalty tests (“Where Government May Not Trespass”) prompting the Bureau to compare him to the National Lawyers Guild. They continued to condemn him for how others used his work: Commager “has long been considered a ‘darling’ of the Communist Party.” The Bureau expressed anti-intellectual sentiments: “Commager’s article illustrates that the real danger to needed Governmental authority is from the pseudo-intellectual realm.” By the early 1960s, the FBI had placed Commager on its “Not to Contact” list because “he has been a long-time critic of the FBI.”

New York Post columnist and editor James Wechsler challenged Hoover’s leadership and defended FBI critics. Wechsler began his career working for liberal-Left publications: the Nation during the late 1930s; and the newspaper PM during the early 1940s. While at PM, the FBI placed him on its “custodial detention” list and Hoover described him (and his wife, Nancy) as “radicals and leftists of the most dangerous type.” At the Post during the 1950s and 1960s, Wechsler criticized the FBI in three key areas. He viewed the infiltration of the CP as counterproductive. He criticized the Bureau’s failure to protect black civil rights workers in the South. In this regard, he proposed stripping the FBI of its jurisdiction for civil rights. Lastly, Wechsler wrote against FBI surveillance of student activism at the University of California, Berkeley. Wechsler’s FBI file grew to about 530 pages with critical notes about his journalism. One memo indicates: “His hostility to Mr. Hoover and the FBI actually renders a negative service to the cause that Wechsler supports.”

In 1962, a Post article featured historian Howard Zinn, who had authored a report critical of the FBI’s civil rights enforcement in Albany, Georgia. A memo in Zinn’s FBI file says his views were “slanted and biased” but “expected from an individual of Zinn’s background.” The FBI identified Zinn as a former Communist. In response to the Post article, Hoover directed agents to discredit Zinn by spreading information about his CP associations and sympathy for Cuba. “Suggest our friends on Georgia papers be alerted.” An FBI official also wrote: “Zinn should not be dignified by contact by this Bureau.” After an article appeared in the Boston Globe in 1964 again quoting Zinn, FBI officials noted: “This is the second time the “Boston Globe” has published distorted articles concerning the FBI… the Crime Records Division [should] attempt to set the record straight through other friendly news sources in the Boston area.” Hoover approved this recommendation with a short note -- “yes and promptly.”

The FBI demonized media criticism even in the form of satire. The Director called Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald a “sick comic” and directed agents to monitor his writing. As an example of Buchwald’s satire, in 1964 he suggested that President Johnson was unable to fire Hoover as director because the lawman actually did not exist. “What happened was that in 1925 the Reader’s Digest was printing an article on the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation and as they do with many pieces they signed it with a nom de plume,” Buchwald wrote. “They got the word Hoover from the vacuum cleaner – to give the idea of a clean-up. Edgar was the name of one of the publisher’s nephews, and J. stood for jail.” An interview with Buchwald in Playboy magazine elicited a long FBI memo about the writer’s subversive Cold War humor. “Buchwald has previously come to the Bureau’s attention in connection with his writings,” the FBI noted.

"Spoke of FBI informers in the Communist Party and the possibility that ‘someday soon J. Edgar Hoover will be elected Chairman of the American Communist Party.’ Buchwald also commented that ‘you’re allowed to make fun of the FBI because they have such a good sense of humor.’ ‘They never get upset when you make fun of them. You may get a call from two FBI Agents the morning after the column appears, at 3 o’clock in the morning, but it always is a friendly call. It is the one organization in Washington that doesn’t mind being laughed at.’

"This particular issue contains no other references to the Bureau or the Director and the entire issue is the typical trash which has characterized ‘Playboy’ since it inception."

In a separate file, the FBI monitored Playboy for carrying on “a campaign of snide innuendoes against the FBI and at times was outright critical of the Bureau and the Director."

The FBI infiltrated writer’s organizations (American Newspaper Guild, Radio Writers Guild, and American Authors League) and focused surveillance on a broad segment of allegedly “anti-American” book authors: E. B. White, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Pearl S. Buck, Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Mailer, Irving Howe, Betty Freidan, and Studs Terkel. The FBI developed informants in the publishing world. The best known case involves Henry Holt and Company. As scholar Claire Culleton notes, for several decades Hoover reviewed manuscripts and the firm sought “his explicit approval on authors and his advanced sanction on works and topics under consideration by the press.” Once the FBI approved a book for production, it obtained advanced copies of page proofs and played a central role in designing Holt’s advertising and marketing campaigns.

Three books critical of the FBI prompted efforts at suppression. In the case of Max Lowenthal’s The Federal Bureau of Investigation (1950), Hoover obtained an advance copy and tried to plant anti-Lowenthal editorials in newspapers. In an effort at censorship, agents tried to discourage booksellers from stocking the work. In order to counter the book’s impact, the FBI distributed a reprint of a Reader’s Digest article, “Why I No Longer Fear the FBI,” by ACLU leader Morris Ernst, who doubled as an FBI informer. Hoover also obtained an advance copy of Fred Cook’s The FBI Nobody Knows (1964) and helped delay publication for several years. Cook’s book built on his Nation article and the FBI believed the negative depiction of Hoover’s relationship to others in government posed a challenge to its organizational integrity. The FBI told its agents:

"Cook claims that official Washington is intimidated by Mr. Hoover, citing a situation in which the publisher of the ‘New York Post’ had found that ‘some of the most distinguished figures in the Hill simply will not be quoted on the subject of Hoover.’ In addition, Cook, through quotes from unnamed liberal Congressman who express fear of Mr. Hoover, attempts to make Mr. Hoover responsible for an atmosphere of conformity. It can be said that the unnamed Congressman seem to be feeble carriers of the liberal tradition if they are afraid to express their views."

The FBI tried to suppress Peter Matthiessen’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983), which offers a sympathetic history of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The book focuses on the FBI’s role in the flawed prosecution of AIM leader Leonard Peltier, which Matthiessen compares to the Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920s. Matthiessen hoped his book “might become an organizing tool in his [Peltier] fight for justice,” while the FBI sought to limit the book’s circulation. Within a year of publication, an FBI special agent cited in the book filed a $25 million libel suit against Matthiessen and his publisher, Viking Press. Although the FBI lost the case after eight years of litigation, the lawsuit substantially delayed paperback and foreign editions. In the Peltier case, two FBI agents had been killed in the line of duty and the Bureau’s pursuit of justice included legal misconduct.

About Me

I am a former college teacher who now devotes his full time to writing and the visual arts. My book, "The Dangers of Dissent: The FBI and Civil Liberties since 1965," was published by Rowman and Littlefield/Lexington Books (October 2010). A second volume, "Surveillance in America: Critical Analysis of the FBI, 1920 to the Present," was published by Lexington Books in June 2012. I live in Silver Spring, MD.